WHEN Aristagoras, governor of Miletus, came to Sparta to request assistance from Cleomenes, the king of that city, he brought with him a tablet of bronze, on which was engraved an outline of the earth, and whereon the circuits of seas and courses of rivers were traced. This map was probably the work of Hecatæus, the historian of the Asiatic city. It is the earliest effort of geographical delineation which we read of in the annals of Greece.

Although rude and imperfect, it served the purpose of conveying to the mind of the spectator a general idea of the leading features of the

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MOUNT LACMOS, OR ZYGO, THE CENTRE.

countries which it portrayed, and was therefore thought worthy of being brought from Asia into Greece, and of being exhibited by an ambassador to a king.

In our introduction to the present work, we shall endeavour to present to the reader a rapid sketch of the geography of Greece, similar in execution to the bronze tablet which Aristagoras put into the hands of Cleomenes. We shall attempt to exhibit to him, in a comprehensive and general outline, the forms of its land, and seas, and rivers. This difference, however, we will aim to observe we design to construct a map from a view of the country itself, rather than to communicate an idea of the country from the contemplation of a map.

For this purpose, we will take our station on one of the most commanding heights of that long range of mountains which, running from north to south in an uninterrupted line, nearly bisects the continent of Greece. This chain, formerly known by the name of PINDUS, is, as it were, the spine or back-bone of that country. Its successive vertebræ are distinguished by different appellations. That which we have chosen as the point to which we shall now particularly refer, is at present termed ZYGO, resembling, in name, the Helvetian Joch, which separates the valley of Engelberg from that

of Meyringen. It was formerly called Lacmos; and stands in 39° 50′ north latitude, and 21° 20′ east longitude. It hangs over the town of Metzovo,

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RIVER AOUS, OR VOIOUSSA.

readers at the close of his last Georgic, of the subterranean grotto, in which all the rivers of the earth were born, and from which they issued, by hidden channels and silent courses, into every quarter of the globe, that he made some reference, more or less direct, to this particular spot, in which, with respect to the continent of Greece, his poetical vision may be said to be realized ; and this conjecture will derive some support from the consideration, that the scene which he is then describing is laid in Thessaly, and indeed at the source of the Peneus itself, one of the very rivers which rises from this mountain reservoir, if we may so call it, at our feet.

The reader will remember the use which our own poet, the author of Paradise Regained, makes of the roads of Italy in his description of the city of Rome, from which they all start, and to which they all return. He will have noticed how Milton from that spot sends, as it were, his thoughts to travel by those routes to the most distant points of the Roman Empire-how, for instance, by the Emilian Way, he penetrates, in imagination, into the forests of Germany, and traverses the British West; how he thence crosses to the Sarmatians, and beyond the Danube to the Tauric Pool: and how again, by the southern communication of the Appian Way, he migrates downward to Syene, and wanders eastward even to India, and the golden Chersonese.

o it is with the Grecian traveller who stands on the point of which we have been speaking. By means of these five rivers which we have named, all starting from this spot, he holds converse, if we may so say, with noble cities, and thick forests, and rich valleys, and fields of battle, which crowd, in his mind, upon their banks; and lastly, with the seas themselves into which they fall, and with the islands which hang upon their coasts. Let him therefore rest for a while, after the toil of his ascent, on some

clear day of summer, on one of those limestone rocks which rise in this place, and beneath the shade of the beeches and the pines which here wave over his head, let him indulge in such reflections as these.

First of all, let him turn his thoughts in the direction by which he himself has probably come. The river Aous, (as it was probably called by a Doric or Æolic form, because it flows from the EAST,) now the Voioussa,